Botton Up
I have always believed in the serendipity of books. It is not Bibliomancy. But, more like synchronicity. The timing of finding a book or a passage from a book that has an uncanny relevance to something happening in my life just then. Have blogged about it in the past. I experienced it again last week.
Alain de Botton is an author I discovered late in life. He is a fascinating thinker — unconventional bordering on controversial. His lives at the intersection of esoteric philosophy and mundane life. That makes him more accessible to non-intellectuals like me. My introduction to Botton happened over “The Course of Love”. That is when I learnt the meaning of “Sapiosexual” — a person who is sexually attracted to a person’s intellect or mind before appearance. But, I could not put the lessons to much use because of my low cerebral quotient.
Last week, Kindle pushed at me a recommendation for another Botton Book — How to Think More About Sex. It was based on my previous readings. That sounded counter-intuitive at an age when my libido ought to be on a decline. I have heard that when you have less of something, you tend to think more about it. Perhaps, it was one of those situations, I tried to rationalise.
I would have left it at that had it not been for a second coincidence. The same list of Kindle threw up another suggestion. This time it was Haruki Murakami’s new collection of short stories — First Person Singular. Deeply intimate — the book has the feel of a memoir. The narrator delves into events and encounters buried in the recesses of his mind, and like a consummate scuba diver emerges with rare vestiges of the past.
Reading Murakami in the company of Botton is like studying literature with a scholastic guide. So, when Murakami remembers the words of a woman with whom he spent a solitary night in his sophomore years saying “Loving someone is like a mental illness that is not covered by health insurance”, you start looking for explanations in Botton’s essays.
Discussing sex, not love, Alain Botton writes: “We should accept that sex is inherently rather weird, instead of blaming ourselves for not responding in more normal ways to its confusing impulses”. A few pages later, he says, “For most of our lives, sex seems fated to remain steeped in longing and awkwardness…..there are really no solutions to the majority of the dilemmas sex creates for us”.
What is the connection between Botton’s thesis and Murakami’s reflections, you may wonder. And, you could well be right in thinking that the two propositions are as dissimilar as chalk and cheese. But, for me, it might have acquired another meaning because I saw them from a different plane I was resting in at that moment. Botton concludes, Great Sex like Happiness is experienced only on a handful of occasions in a lifetime. Both are more generally “the precious and sublime exception”. Thus, as we get older, we look back repeatedly and nostalgically to a few erotic episode (to) realise with what stinginess nature extends her gifts to us”.
Murakami expresses the same thought more lyrically. “People age in a blink of an eye. Each and every moment, our bodies are on a one-way journey to collapse and deterioration, unable to turn back the clock”, he writes. In the interim, so many things vanish and disappear without a trace, leaving, at best, a faint memory. Even memory can be hardly relied on. “Can anyone say for certain what happened to us back then?” — he asks. If we are blessed, though, a few words may remain by our side” — the master tells us.
Paul Bowle’s in his novel — The Sheltering Sky writes: “Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless”.
Bernardo Bertolucci adapted it into a film. One of his lesser known works. The story centres on Port Moresby and his wife Kit, a married couple originally from New York who travel to the North African desert accompanied by a friend. The journey, initially an attempt by Port and Kit to resolve their marital difficulties, is quickly fraught by dangers under the open skies. Two of them — Porter and Kit Moresby — are writers, intellectuals, who have remained together for some 10 years, even though there are large unsettled areas between them.
The movie, certainly not Bertolucci’s best, is considered to be an antithesis of his classic, The Last Tango in Paris. In the latter, Bertolucci had explored the intimate proximity of doomed lovers inside a closed room. In the Sheltering Sky, he has passion juxtaposed against the vastness of the Sahara Desert.
Most of us plod through life carrying our unresolved Freudian tangles. Society trains us to internalise the conflicts. Sublimation of carnal desire is the dharma of householders we are conditioned to accept. We learn, as Botton prescribes, to “focus on the management of pain rather than its outright elimination.”
Very few push the boundaries — let alone go on wild adventures across continents to discover their sexuality. In my experience, I have found men — while being much more amenable to sexual escapades or extra-marital romantic interludes — are less inclined to deeper psychological explorations. It perhaps stems from their natural aversion to developing emotional attachment. As the adage goes, “love is the price men pay for sex, while sex is the price women pay for love”.
So, I have male friends and acquaintances — who are into relationships outside their marriage. But, have rarely come across too many who are involved at a subcutaneous level, piercing the subconscious as it were. In contrast, I think women have always been more honest about their feelings. It would be incorrect to assume that this is a modern phenomenon. History and literature through the ages, and across cultures and societies, are replete with tales of women who have let the heart overrule conventional morality.
This, in my view, is because women are essentially sensual beings. That makes them naturally comfortable about their sexuality without (necessarily) being obsessed with sex. While men may like to flaunt their physique, women love their bodies. For men, sex is a release of nervous energy, whereas women take pleasure in physical intimacy. Thus, women are less rattled by love wafting through their lives without unsettling their core existence. For them — it is neither a taste of the forbidden fruit nor the thrill of illicit excursions from mundane existence. It is a plunge into consciousness — to discover some parts of the soul buried deep down in the psyche.
In another work, The Spider’s House, Bowles echoes a similar sentiment — The only thing that makes life worth living is the possibility of experiencing now and then a perfect moment. And perhaps even more than that, it’s having the ability to recall such moments in their totality, to contemplate them like jewels.”
#Haruki Murakami #Paul Bowles #Alan de Botton #sex #love #relationship #old age
Article first published in GhoseSpot
